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Bloomberg Cancels Radio Talk Amid Furor Over Aide

By Michael Barbaro September 2, 2011 9:34 amSeptember 2, 2011 9:34 am

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg canceled his weekly radio appearance, scheduled for Friday morning, amid a growing outcry over his handling of a top aide’s arrest over a domestic violence complaint, said a person told of the mayor’s decision.

The move appeared to be an attempt to avoid the public spotlight — and potential questions about why Mr. Bloomberg sought to conceal the arrest of Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith. When Mr. Goldsmith resigned several weeks ago, the mayor’s office said he was leaving to pursue a job in private business.

On Thursday, it was revealed that Mr. Goldsmith had actually stepped down because of the arrest, which stemmed from an altercation with his wife, Margaret, that involved screaming and shoving at their town house in Washington.

A spokesman for the mayor, Marc La Vorgna, declined to comment Friday morning. The radio program on WOR-AM (710), which starts around 8 a.m., generally touches on the major news of the week, but has a breezy tone: its host, John Gambling, is not known for posing particularly tough questions to the mayor.

In Mr. Bloomberg’s absence, Mr. Gambling spent 12 minutes discussing the controversy on his program, and said he thought that Mr. Bloomberg was making a mistake by not explaining his actions.

“I do think that the mayor has made a mistake because he’s going to have to answer the question,” Mr. Gambling said. “There’s no way out of it at this point. There’s no way out of it, because now it has turned into a megillah, and every reporter in New York City is after him for an answer, or a confrontation.”

Mr. Gambling said he understood that the mayor might have chosen not to make Mr. Goldsmith’s arrest public out of loyalty, but asked, “Did he really believe that this story would not come out? I mean, it was a public record.”

Mr. Gambling suggested that the mayor should have heeded some conventional wisdom: “Don’t try and cover things up, because you’re always going to get caught eventually,” and he said that Mr. Bloomberg, at this point, has “got to come clean.”

“This isn’t the end of it,” Mr. Gambling said. “This is only really the beginning of the story now, that could have been dealt with a month ago. It’s only going to reflect worse on the mayor.”

Friday is the second day in a row on which Mr. Bloomberg has scheduled no public events where reporters might have an opportunity to ask him questions.

Several of the city’s most prominent lawmakers have rebuked the mayor for offering a misleading explanation for why Mr. Goldsmith departed, especially given the mayor’s longstanding advocacy for transparency in government. City Hall has refused to comment on how it handled the episode.

On Friday, two of the mayor’s reliable allies on policy matters, the editorial boards of The New York Post and The Daily News, took Mr. Bloomberg to task for misrepresenting the circumstances surrounding the resignation.

The News wrote that the mayor “let loyalty get the better of his duty to provide the public with straight goods.”

“Bloomberg,” it said, “owed New York the full explanation for his deputy’s departure, for the sake of the historical record and to enable the public to judge the quality of the mayor’s staff picks.”

“New Yorkers have a right to know when the second-most powerful man in city government is sitting in a D.C. jail cell,” its editorial said.

“It’s utterly inexplicable that no announcement of the arrest was made — and even yesterday the mayor’s office was refusing substantive comment. Not good enough,” the Post concluded. “Mr. Mayor. Explain yourself.”

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